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Vojislava Filipcevic Historical Narrative
and The East-West Leitmotif in Milcho Manchevski's Before the Rain
and Dust Vojislava Filipcevic is an advanced Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University and teaches at The New School University. She has an interdisciplinary and international educational background in urbanism, film, and cultural studies. She writes about art and its social context, cinema, spatial theory, and contemporary urban culture. Her review essay on Maria Full of Grace was recently published in Cineaste. |
The
article discusses the cinematic "imaging" of the Balkans, in the
context of the region's recent socio-political and historical "imaginings,"
through an analysis of Macedonian director Milcho Manchevski's innovative
films Before the Rain and Dust. The author argues that Manchevski constructs
a novel East-West encounter and uncovers new meanings of "in-betweenness"
in the Balkan cinema through an advanced visual grammar and powerful iconography
of interlinked reverse exiles and crossings (in both Dust and Before the
Rain), and through a hybrid-genre, cinematic critique of Balkan historical
narratives (albeit with several plot shortcomings, especially in Dust).
Representations of Macedonia in both films present landscapes of ambiguous
authenticities torn between the rural, ethnic-nationalist settings and their
reconstruction through the uncertain, reflexive gaze of exiles. If Before
the Rain's presumption of the circularity of history in part affirms the
persistence of violence in the Balkans (as other scholars have argued),
the film's narrative on the contrary complicates and challenges this assumption
through visions of crisscrossed East-West exiles. In Dust's key sequences
of storytelling, Manchevski presents one of the most critical reconstructions
of a Balkan historical narrative in film. Here, Manchevski subverts the
"Western genre" in the Balkan context through the confrontation
of Eastern and Western histories: the Wild West collides with the "Wild
East" of early 20th century Balkan warfare. Manchevski's innovative
technique critically engages with the dual heritage of East-West heroism,
patriotism, and "mythmaking" in genre film. This "exile of
the genre" hints as well at a counter-hegemonic potential of creative
reinterpretations and reconstructions of both Eastern and Western film traditions
in a post-global cinema yet to come. More broadly, in Before the Rain, the
director's focus on "words" and "pictures," that is,
the historical narrative and the historical vision, perhaps suggests both
Western and Eastern inabilities to fully come to terms with historical truths. |
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Steffen Hantke
Spectacular Optics: The Deployment of Special Effects in David Cronenberg's Films Steffen Hantke teaches for the Cultural Studies Program in the English Department of Sogang University in Seoul, South Korea. He has published essays and reviews on contemporary literature, film, and culture in Paradoxa, College Literature, The Journal of Popular Culture, Post Script, Science Fiction Studies, and other journals. He is author of Conspiracy and Paranoia in Contemporary Literature (Peter Lang, 1994) and editor of Horror, a special topics issue of Paradoxa (2002), as well as Horror: Creating and Marketing Fear (U Press of Mississippi, 2004). |
Although highly regarded as the work of an auteurist director, David Cronenberg's films have not been studied closely for their use of special effects. Critics often dismiss special effects as cheap thrills, incommensurable with narrative and thematic sophistication. Though ostensibly preoccupied with postmodern "body horror," Cronenberg often prefers rigidly formal, and thus emotionally distancing, compositions to those creating affective immediacy when staging special effects. This stylistic idiosyncrasy, which has the cinematic gaze linger rather than fluctuate between looking and looking-away, constructs the abject bodies in his films as objects of a sublime gaze. As a result, Cronenberg's films aid in demystifying the technological fantasy of special effects themselves, while representing a humane vision of the human body as an object in the material world. |
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Book Reviews William Rothman and Mariane Keane, Reading Cavell's "The World
Viewed"
Anna Everett, Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism,
1909-1949 |
